Cultural Awareness in Primary School English Teaching

Abstract

The English curriculum at the stage of compulsory education is of the dual nature of instrumentality and humanity. When it comes to humanity, the task of English curriculum is to improve students’ comprehensive humanity qualities, one of which is to deepen their understanding of different cultures. Cultural awareness is a reflection of the core literacy in English learning. The cultivation of students’ cultural awareness not only contributes to students’ strengthening of national identity, enhancing of cultural self-confidence in the traditional culture of the nation, but also helps develop an inclusive attitude towards excellent foreign cultures, thereby improving their cross-cultural communication competence. Since the textbooks are regarded as core teaching materials, it is essential for textbooks to contain various cross-cultural elements to better cultivate learners’ cultural awareness. Therefore, cultural content in English textbooks is a necessary issue to be investigated. This paper took 6A Unit 8 Chinese New Year (Yilin Edition) as an example to integrate more cultural knowledge into the specific teaching design. The results in this paper reveal that teachers play four roles in primary school English teaching in terms of raising students’ cultural awareness, namely, the emotion motivator, the cognition inspirator, the behavior guide and the morality regulator.